The Warcraft line of game was initially intended to be a Warhammer game, but they didn't get the IP. Those guys were around a long time before Blizzard existed. Blizzard's so famous IP is a Warhammer clone.

True, I remember the original story of how Warcraft 1 was suppose to be Warhammer. But since then, Warcraft 3's game engine was incredible change from 1's. And Warcraft Online DID come out before Warhammer Online.

Warcraft developed their own lore, if anything Warcraft ripped off it's game mechanics from every other game that came before it, but that's common place in the game industry.

So the only IP you're referring to is the concept of Orcs, humans, elves, and the likes fighting in battles? There's pr

The Warcraft line of game was initially intended to be a Warhammer game, but they didn't get the IP. Those guys were around a long time before Blizzard existed. Blizzard's so famous IP is a Warhammer clone.

Games Workshop so famous IP is a LOTR rip off. So what? People have been borrowing ideas from those that came before them for more years then you've been alive.

The similarities between Warcraft and Warhammer are a bit more than "they both have orcs." The visual styles are rather distinctive and similar; it's more like, "they both have ferocious orcs wearing big shoulder armor fighting against the 'forces of good' lead by humans."

Blizzard's secret sauce has almost always been to take existing gameplay and setting concepts, file off the serial numbers, then polish them to a lustrous shine. The original Diablo was a simplified Moria [remarque.org] (or Nethack without the puzzle

I love people like you. You have no clue about the development process at all, and you make far to many assumptions. If a game was released in a shitty state could be because of a bad QA yes, but at the same time they could have found 90% of the issues but due to a set release date or any other sort of pressure from production/development they were punted by programmers/producers to be fixed later. Either way you are too quick to blame one singular entity of the process instead of the whole based purely on what you assume.

And I love people like you, who are so eager to blame the producer (or anyone else) for not giving a team infinite funds and time.

The facts are:

1. The producer isn't some mysterious bogeyman who does nothing but set arbitrary deadlines and stop you from finishing QA. The producer is the guy who pays for the whole development _and_ QA, and each extra month is a month he'll be paying for.

2. I don't know how you imagine things to be, but any project involves some negotiations. Basically those devs said at some point, "yes, we can do it before date X and with Y million dollars." I'm not aware of any game which was pushed out before the date the devs agreed on. In fact, most blow the deadline and the budget. Some outright lie to get the contract, or are apparently unable to learn from past bad estimates.

Warhammer Online has been in development longer than WoW IIRC, and it looked so often that it was going nowhere that it was cancelled and then continued after all a couple of times. The first cancelling I remember was in _2004_ FFS. And that's not the _start_ date, it's one of the dates when it wasn't going anwhere.

And while I have no clue about how it went with the deadlines and budget in the final round, but at the very least, the team delivered less than they promised. See all that cut out content. That's stuff they hadn't just promised their fans, it's stuff they had promised the publisher for that money too. They effectively delivered maybe half the game they had been paid for, or maybe even less.

3. Most games actually don't even break even as it is. E.g., EA actually subsidizes a heck of a lot of games out of the profits of their sports games and such. I.e., statistically the expectation for any of those games is that it will be yet another hole to throw money down. And digging a bigger hole isn't exactly going to help.

So, yes, from where I stand it looks to me entirely fair to blame the devs. What do _you_ propose? That the publisher keeps throwing money down a rat hole until the end of times?

Warhammer Online has been in development longer than WoW IIRC, and it looked so often that it was going nowhere that it was cancelled and then continued after all a couple of times. The first cancelling I remember was in _2004_ FFS. And that's not the _start_ date, it's one of the dates when it wasn't going anwhere.

I have no idea how this got modded informative. This has nothing to do with Mythic. Keep in mind, when Warhammer was originally canceled in 2004, it was under development with another company: Climax Online. It wasn't until sometime in mid-2005 when Mythic Entertainment acquired the Warhammer Online license. And Mythic wasn't even under the EA umbrella until after 2006.

They effectively delivered maybe half the game they had been paid for, or maybe even less.

And I, as a fan, appreciated that. They did their fans a great service by cutting out the content that they knew that they couldn't get out

This was nowhere near alpha or AoC quality. This was definitely a poor game (in the abstract). It is a weak guild wars clone, but most of the assets and the mechanics worked correctly from release. PvP (for the borefest it is) worked from the start and most of the game mechanics worked perfectly (level scaling, keeps worked correctly when the instance wasn't pwnd, quests, crafting, etc).

Q. What's worse than DAOC mez?A. WAR knockback.

This didn't make the game fun and it was obviously unfinished in a couple a

Well, I found the game to work fine from release with a couple minor things. The occasional crash when changing zones, the crafting is difficult to get interested in. Other than that, it worked pretty good on my mac playing 1680x1050 with everthing at full in dual booted windows. I played World of Warcraft from closed beta, to open beta, up until about 6 months ago when I finally tired completely and I can tell you, that game was far worse at release than Warhammer. Things like the loot-lock bug come to mi

GOA were the worst MMO company I've ever used when I played the English version of DAoC, everything from having their servers hacked, to having an overheating processor lead to database corruption through to continuing to charge people for subscriptions who had cancelled their accounts.

I have no idea why Mythic chose GOA for Warhammer, I think it's cos they'd been picked up by EA afterwards and couldn't run the Euro show on their own so the contract was already sign

But I never found anything inherently wrong with WAR that wasn't also a problem in every other MMO ever developed (i.e. the grind!). I was primarily responding to the comments made by the person I replied to regarding translation and that IS GOA's area and GOA's fault.

QA? What QA? That game was released as a festering pile of dungheap barely deserving the name alpha quality. It is patently obvious it is another AoC in the making.

I completely agree. I played the game at release and the only way I could play it on my system was with a mod (the one that reduced the graphics updating when spellcasting I believe, can't remember exactly), which a later update rendered useless, at which point I stopped playing.

Apart from some of the cut content the game seemed pretty polished to me and was good fun.

I didn't encounter anything that would suggest this was a game not fit for release.

I think they should've just held off on release and finished off the content, that was all that was missing. They tried to do in 2 years what took Blizzard over 6 years and did a damn good job, the codebase was clearly solid- never encountered any instability issues either client or

I can think of several things, but as random blatant examples, as launched:

- if you kept beating on an NPC, at some point it said it runs away in fear. Except it didn't, it stood there like an idiot doing nothing. Then if he survived a few seconds in that state (quite easy for major bosses) it would suddenly heal back to full helt. How _that_ got through QA, I can't even imagine.

- enemies stuck in terrain, e.g., in the cave with the squigs in the greenskin starting quests.

- if you kept beating on an NPC, at some point it said it runs away in fear. Except it didn't, it stood there like an idiot doing nothing. Then if he survived a few seconds in that state (quite easy for major bosses) it would suddenly heal back to full helt. How _that_ got through QA, I can't even imagine.

- enemies stuck in terrain, e.g., in the cave with the squigs in the greenskin starting quests.

- retarded pet AI. In WoW if your pet can't reach an enemy, it stays with you. In WAR it ran in some retarded direction and down some corridor, and only eventually it would figure out to come back to you.

There were similar major bugs in WoW at some point in time also. The difference is that Blizzard mostly fixed these bugs a while ago but then again they've had several years to do so. Even then some of the bugs were long-standing like the evasion bug where if you stood in just the wrong spot and the pathing algorithm had trouble getting a clear path from the enemy to a person who had threat on the enemy then the enemy would heal to full. This happened quite a bit, especially in large raids where there we

Yup, the original complainer's first bug listed sounded just like the WoW evade bug, which is still pretty common. I guess less so on raid bosses (squeaky wheel gets the oil...) but plenty still occur in normal PvE, especially in Northrend.

That said, I eventually dropped WAR for WoW - the realm balance was the killer in the end.

Let me repeat the bug: "f you kept beating on an NPC, at some point it said it runs away in fear. Except it didn't, it stood there like an idiot doing nothing. Then if he survived a few seconds in that state (quite easy for major bosses) it would suddenly heal back to full helt."

I don't mean if it's stuck or inaccessible. I mean every single fucking enemy, in every single fucking fight, even if you're in melee with it and it had no problems fighting back until then.

I honestly can't remember that bug happening more than a handful of times while I was playing it. I let me account lapes last month because my friends weren't playing anymore and my free time doesn't fit with a MMO anymore. I played two characters to the high 20's, another to 21, and several more in the high teens. Maybe five mobs that bugged out that whole time.

They _all_ gave the message that they're running away, but just stood there. (Unless you managed to get them from above that threshold directly to zero in one hit, I suppose.) I'll assume you mean that maybe 5 mobs actually managed to make it to the stage where they actually healed themselves. (It did have to be pretty tough to survive that far with some people beating up on it.) But if you looked at the logs, every single one of them spewed the message and failed to run.

Loot Lag
Mailbox Lag
Bank Lag
Equiping Gear Lag
Mob not dieing after you got him to 0%
Quest NPCs not giving you rewards for a quest but completing the quest still.
Stats setting back to their naked values
Many many many server crashes
Patches that made things worse to fix some exploit
Lots of dupe exploits
Mobs getting stuck underground where they could hit you and you couldn't hit back
Getting stuck "looting" and having to restart the game to get out of it.
Game crashes

I played both games at release and your list is a bit off:
Four kinds of lag - yes, I will definitely give you that, there was all kinds of lag at various times during the first few months and then again after major content releases. I gave (and still give) Blizzard slack there because the popularity of WoW blew everything previous out of the water, and they were Not Prepared(TM)
Mob not dying after you got him to 0%, Quests completing without granting rewards, Stats setting back to their naked values - I'

Mob not dying after you got him to 0%, Quests completing without granting rewards, Stats setting back to their naked values - I've never had any of these happen to me in 6 months of beta WoW and 3 years of retail WoW, nor have I heard of it. Perhaps you are thinking of a different game

I've never seen or heard of the stat reset bug but the other two were usually related to some sort of lag. My favorite bug was the multiple reward bug where you could turn in a quest, force-quit the game, and then turn in the quest a second time when you logged back in and get double the xp and rewards. It was tough to do but at one point you could do it reliably with a little practice.

There was also the shaman negative agility bug that was fun, over 100% crit and dodge and tons of armor - it made shaman

Just to nitpick, the first two complaints you mention are things that happens in WoW to this day. Though not as frequently. Suprise, they don't happen nearly as often in WAR now either. I will concede that pet pathing was atleast six kinds of insane though.
As for a perceived lack of variety, I don't understand what you're trying to say. Questing sucks fairly equally in both in my opinion, but the fact that you could choose to level by traditional grinding/groups(PQs, Kill Collectors,ect), through questing

Actually, the most idiotic problems I experienced myself were the mobs running away at olympic sprinter levels when on low health, the insanely high respawn rates and the fact that abilities were laggy as hell.

Mostly though, i stopped playing because the immersion was just not all that fantastic.Decent enough game, great concepts, but not so great execution.

I have to say, I had a vastly different experience.- I didn't experience the NPC character resetting its health. Mind you, I didn't kill major bosses, but I did kill a few minor ones. None of them had that problem.- Areas were huge - covering them on foot was often a chore. I'm an avid explorer, and I found some of the early areas to be too big.- Can't say anything about crafting, as I didn't try it- Quests were quite often kill or collect quests. Same thing as wow, which only recently introduced anything o

Just out of curiousity, what class did you play? I played a rune priest specced for over-time healing and damage. There were a few times where I wasn't able to kill a mob fast enough and it reset on me.

Additionally, I played Wow since day one, so I remember well the big issues. On day one, anytime you looted an item for the first time, there was a huge delay. But major game issues like that were fixed early on. Yeah, I continued to have issues casting arcane missiles a year after WoW came out, but those b

Like Frigga's Ring, I did play WoW 1.0, I don't remember it being anywhere near as poor quality as WAR. Yes, it had its issues, but by and large it worked and was fun to play. And the quests were largely the same as today in the pre-BC areas so I'm not sure wtf you've been smoking if you think only recently they added anything more than "kill X" and "collect Y". Repeat after me: other than a few moved NPCs, and very few Draenei and Blood Elves added which give 1-2 quests each, the quests in the "old world"

No I find casual approach to PvP very unsatisfying. The game combat is geared such that everyone gets to win sometime. All you have to do is bring more friends to the battlefield. I guess such approach works for the most part at keeping your audience pool large, as some players just won't play if they can never score a kill. I just have a different definition of PvP is all.

Clearly running the same battlegrounds from 11-80 is far superior:P
I would rather tattoo my retinas to say Cock and Balls respectively than run another godforsaken AV.
And I didn't even get the privilege of that kick in the pants until three years ago!

The game I used to play no longer exists in it's true form. It has been warped into another run-of-the-mill gear grinder. Prior to that you needed two things to pvp, balls and a brain. If you had bigger balls and sharper brain you could take on amazing odds and come out on top. Show where pvp like this exists in a modern MMO? It is extinct.

PvP combat that is predetermined mostly before hand by 1. gear 2.class 3.level is not my cup of tea. And the only way to beat the handicap chart is to use greater num

Games Workshop probably wanted a million or more, but Mythic's been in the pay-for-play business long enough to know that number is farcically high. For a western MMO, 300K is a very healthy number of ongoing subs. I'd honestly guess that their internal targets were 200,000 to 250,000.

but when i was playing warhammer, the controls felt like they where from a rpg on the sega master system. it looked ok, but the controls and responses weren't, and it made everything feel clumsy to me.

Maybe a few people felt that way, but I am sure not a majority. A lot of people would love to find a new MMO...it is just Warhammer wasn't it. I played it...it was fun. PvP was much more accessible and enjoyable. But there was very little social interaction. People were always busy. And when WotLK came out...there was no comparison on what game is the more polished. WotLK improved upon an already stellar game. The grinds were less grindy. The quests were grouped better and more interesting. The in

And to be honest it does reek of unfinished. The graphics are sub-par, the animations are buggy and jerky at times. There are places you can get stuck and unable to move on certain prolifically-placed doodads - and the/stuck command requires you to wait 30 seconds while it logs you out (which btw is another annoyance, you can't even select 'exit now' when you want to quit game and HAVE to wait 30s before it closes)There is no antroscopic filtering (As far as I can find, the advanced graphics settings are l

Destruction's army takes site 1, Order takes 2, 3 is left open, Destruction moves to 2, Order to 3, etc, then Destruction to 3, Order to 1 and so on. Each massive army seeing no actual Combat, except against the meagre force of enemy NPCs guarding the checkpoints, and all they're really doing is farming renown, XP and Influence.

You are playing on the wrong server.

Play on Dark Crag.

Yes, it is open and there is a lot newbie ganking on T1, but in T4 there are massive battles because it is the highest pop serve

It wasn't that the game was bad - I liked it and kept my subscription up since release even though I only played it a few times.

It was that rebooting my MacBook Pro from OS X into Vista became too high a bar for entry. It was just easier to load up WoW than to reboot and play WAR. When you use OS X for everything, and you have to quit all the apps and reboot for a game...

I wanted to love it. I bought a copy for myself (collector's edition) and a copy for my wife. We played for a few hours in total (I hit level 10!), but in the end, the game did not fit our need for casual gaming.

We didn't want an easy game or everything handed to us. We just wanted a game that was accessible. Booting to another OS sounds simple (and is) but after a while it becomes too much.

It also failed to run at a playable framerate on systems more than capable of WoW. Two friends of mine tried it and it wasn't playable for them, and there's simply no way my girlfriend's computer could play WAR. (Admittedly even WoW is stretching it, but at least it runs and is playable at low detail.)

WoW should serve as an example of how cutting edge graphics do not rule the MMO landscape the way they do in other games. It would be nice if other developers took note that WoW has initiated millions into the MMO market. Despite all their collective faults, actual or perceived, the WoW subscribers have more appreciation now regarding issues like PvP/PvE balance, bots, grouping, crafting, housing, etc.
Old MMOs when in development found their forums flooded with questions about screenshots/movies. Now

The consumers have gotten over the glitz factor being the number one selling point with MMOs and are now showing interest in gameplay aspects that before they didn't even have the vocabulary to discuss.

If you think Wow has made people smarter about MMOs then you are reading the wrong forum threads. I would say that while Wow does well at what it does, it's not an MMO that educates the audience overall.

Now go look at the new Star Wars MMO in development and you have daily questions about will it be released with a native Mac client or how will it handle PvP/RvR or crafting vs looting gear.

Yes, and those same questions were being asked when the "other" Star Wars MMO was coming out. Star Wars Galaxies was one of the most ironic games ever to be released. Ironic why? Because the engine was fantastic (for the time) the graphics were a mile above anything else at that time. Also ironic as the

I did not start as a WoW player. I was a DAoC player and was looking forward to WAR. I preordered WAR, and in my case my system supported it. When I tried to get my two WoW-playing friends to switch, they readily did give it a try (former DAoCers who for 2 years or so swore they'd never touch WoW...) - it wouldn't run playably on their rather above-average systems.

I wound up as a compromise playing WoW while they got their system upgraded. (I think my offer was "I'll give WoW a try f

I wound up as a compromise playing WoW while they got their system upgraded. (I think my offer was "I'll give WoW a try for a month if you give WAR a chance".)

I think that was a pretty fair compromise. It sucks that you didn't get to enjoy WAR as much as you would have liked, but I'm glad that you're enjoying WoW with your friends. Having a group of kick-ass friends to play with makes any game fun!

There was some performance problems at release. I had two machines that would run WoW, but only the newer would run WAR. Out of curiosity's sake I started it up on the older machine in early January and it ran quite smoothly at moderate settings.

I somehow doubt that the downfall of the game was due to the fact that it didn't cater to a niche of Apple fans. I think the fact that the game is dull and not particularly innovative has a lot more to do with their problems than the fact that it didn't cater to every OS out there.

I think you underestimate the chain reaction effect that happens when an MMORPG doesn't "cater to a niche of Apple fans." The rather large WoW guild I was in at the time WAR launched discussed doing a mass guild reroll to WAR and then decided against it because a decent chunk of our members, all using Macs, didn't want to have to deal with installing Bootcamp. While only maybe five or six players couldn't physically play the game, they were popular enough among the other few dozen that everyone just ended

The game is still quite playable, there are people playing at all levels so its not difficult to get a group, and its the sort of game that you can log into, do a mission or two in half an hour to an hour and feel like you accomplished something.

This is from their super big announcement. If you go and read the original thread, and talk to any actual Warhammer player, you'll see that all we care about is FIXING THE EXISTING GAME. There are bugs that have been reported since beta that are still in place. Classes that were revamped just before release and don't really work all that well.The entire player community was waiting with baited breath for/fixes/ and/tweaks/ to ma

Huh? So T1-T4 RVR/ORVR and PVP. Scenarios. 3 PQ's per chapter, 22 chapters per race. Nevermind all the hidden world unlocks (You do use Tome Titan, don't you?), lairs, quests, and the 11 or so classes per side...

Although not the worst MMO I've ever played, I tired of WAR pretty quickly. Kept my subscription going for 1 month after the free one and found that I logged in only twice that month.
I think I just got burned out on MMO's, went from WoW in 2004 to LoTRO, to EVE, to AOC and finally to WAR.

What killed the game for me were a few factors:
1) Everyone who came into the game came with at least a couple of friends/family, who then proceeded to grind quests and mobs at lightning pace all the while ignoring my